BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Turkey's
prime minister dismissed on Monday any suggestion Ankara should
apologize for downing a
Russian warplane in its airspace
last week, after winning strongNATO support for the right to defend itself.

Six days after NATO member
Turkey shot down the Russian fighter jet in the first known incident of its kind
since the Cold War, calls for calm have gone largely unheeded as
Ankara refuses to back down and Russia responds with sanctions.

"No country should ask us to apologize," Prime Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu told reporters following a meeting with NATO's secretary general at the alliance
headquarters in Brussels.

"The protection of our land borders, our airspace, is not only a
right, it is a duty," he said. "We apologize for committing
mistakes, not for doing our duty."

Russian President Vladimir Putin
said on Nov. 26 he is waiting for an apology after Turkey's air force shot down the Su-24 fighter
jet along the Turkey-Syria border.

Following the meeting with NATO
chief Jens Stoltenberg in which he won the alliance's firm
support for the right to self-defense, Davutoglu also warned that
such incidents continued to be a risk as long as Russia and the
U.S-led coalition bombing Islamic State in Syria worked
separately.

"If there are two coalitions functioning in the same airspace
against ISIL, these types of incidents will be difficult to
prevent," Davutoglu said, referring to Islamic State militants.

Moscow's surprise intervention in the four-year-old Syrian civil
war in September wrong-footed the West and put Turkey, which shares a long border with Syria,
directly at odds with Russian
support for the Assad regime there.

NATO's Stoltenberg echoed Western calls for calm, while Israeli
Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon on Sunday underscored the
coordination with Russia that allowed Israel to avoid flare-ups
after aRussian warplane operating
in Syria strayed into Israeli-controlled airspace. It turned back
after the two countries conferred.

The downing of the Russian warplane has wrecked both
Turkish-Russian relations and the
French-led diplomatic effort to bring Moscow closer into the fold
of nations seeking to destroy Islamic State through military
action in Syria.

While Russia says it is also targeting Islamic State, most of its
air strikes have been against other Assad opponents, including
groups actively supported by Turkey.